One of the reasons that HiFi Productions puts on highly successful shows time after time is that I personally talk to clients about the importance of the room setup for every show we do. There are a couple of key elements (see my blog on serving food) to having a great event and one of the big ones is not having a dance floor.
I know it might be natural to think that if you’re having live music that music encourages dancing and dancing requires a dance floor, right! I would say that in most cases you would be 100% correct! In the specific instance of dueling pianos, however, a dance floor actually works against what we are trying to accomplish.
In Dueling Pianos, we are going for overall crowd participation. This is a major factor in what makes our shows different from having a live, more traditional band. On almost every song we perform, we’re asking the audience to be engaged and participate in one way or another. We might have people clapping along, singing a chorus completely by themselves, we might even pull people up to do a dance or to rock a cowbell.
Having a dance floor in front of us greatly separates us from the audience and we don’t want that! We want to be right next to them, we want to hear them singing, we want to engage with people during and in between songs. Have you ever been to a dueling piano bar? Did you notice that they didn’t have a dance floor? I’ve learned through experience of playing hundreds of shows that having a dance floor in front of us feels like the crowd is an ocean away and hinders participation greatly. Not being a dance fueled type of show, we wouldn’t have very many dancers on that floor anyway.
I am by no means saying that dancing is banned at our shows or anything crazy like that! We follow where the show might naturally take us and on a few songs we might have a group of people break out into some funky dance moves and that’s totally awesome! It’s just not a focus of the show and the separation a dance floor creates is not worth it.
If having a packed dance floor for your event is what you’re envisioning or wanting, I would encourage you to consider a DJ or live band. There is a reason that our dueling piano show has a great reputation and it’s not because we pack dance floors, it’s because we engage and leave people with a different experience.